10 Best Tumblr Alternatives You Must Try in 2020

Tumblr is one of the most popular social media and micro-blogging platform with over 23 million actives users in the united states alone. It also ranked 7th among its competitors and hosts over 100 billion blog posts worldwide.

The Yahoo-owned Tumblr (later bought by Verizon) lets users post text, images, links, quotes, and multimedia to a short-form blog but some factors force the user to find an alternative or a replacement.

Some people may tend to find an alternative to Tumblr because of the demerits that exist on the platform, such as age restriction and domain-based hosting. The site requires users to be at least 13 years (16 for some countries) and doesn’t support porn related content.

Moreover, Blogs on Tumblr can only be self-hosted on the Tumblr servers while there are alternatives to let you host the blog with your own domain and software. To avoid these drawbacks, I will show you the best replacement or alternatives to Tumblr.

1. Blogger

Every blogger should first start with a blogger. It’s truly the best Tumblr alternative and one of the easiest blogging platforms on the web. If you are a long time Google user, then creating and using the blogger won’t be a big task because the platform is owned by Google. Blogger provides a simple post editor and supports up to 100 posts per account with built-in analytics to monitor the page views, traffic source, countries from the site are been visited, etc.

The Blogger also has a variety of built-in themes to choose from and provides an option to import third party themes as well. But both are limited in customization. There is no issue regarding the monetization because the Adsense if fully integrated into Blogger since the ad network is also owned by Google. Just like others, Blogger includes multi-user support and provides an option for people to comment.

Another advantage worth mentioning is performance and speed. The whole site is taken care of by Google for maximum speed and performance while the user may fully concentrate on writing the blog posts. These options and features make the Blogger one of the best Tumblr alternatives.

So far, the advantage has been clarified and now let’s get into the disadvantages. There are not a lot of demerits but some are very important. The first and main downside is that the Blogger doesn’t allow you to host your blog on a web server. Using DNS functionality, the custom domain can be linked to Blogger.

2. WordPress

WordPress is a free and open-source builder to create a website. It is also the most popular, flexible, and highly customizable tool to built and manage a site. Moreover, 36% of the websites around the world were built on WordPress. That’s enough said to add it to the best Tumblr alternative.

WordPress provides two choices to choose from. The one is a paid variant that takes care of everything for you including hosting and managing the webserver. The other one is a free and open-source script-based content managed system that can be loaded on your own web server.

The software is highly customizable and user-friendly but using the plugins makes it fairly complicated. There are many themes and plugins to enrich the usability and functionality of the website. Like Blogger, it also provides multi-user support but with the advanced option and includes SEO optimization, community support, plugin integration to enhance the site, and a lot more.

3. Medium

Medium is founded in 2012 by the Twitter co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams and quickly grown with over $130 million in 5 years. It is one of the easiest and simple platform to write and publish contents. Either writing the content or importing from another site, Medium supports both. It allows you to completely import an article from another site if you own that content. This makes easier for the user to publish content on multiple platforms.

Medium provides a clear and beautiful interface with a simple text editor. Since the DA of the Medium is high, the blog post performs better on Google search. The publicity on Medium is really high with over 60 million visitors per month that make the blog reach more people if written well. Medium also provides built-in analytics to monitor the traffic.

The main drawback of the platform is the customization. Medium almost has no customization options that set the user to a restricted environment in terms of personalization. Additionally, Medium includes support for linking custom domains.

4. Mastodon

Mastodon is an open-source self-hosted social networking service with A-GPL 3.0 license. It acts more like Twitter with followings and followers. Users can create posts and other people who find it interesting can award them with likes, comments, and repost. Each post has a limit of 500 characters and privacy settings can be modified for individual posts.

Unlike other platforms, however, Mastodon is decentralized, meaning that no person or company is running it while other social media platforms are owned and operated by a single corporation that has full control over everything.

Anyone can create and run their own server of Mastodon and have their own set of rules. Finally, the platform is free from ads. Considering these merits, Mastodon can be one of the best Tumblr alternatives to try.

Advantages:

Users can create their own Mastodon server with their own rules

Decentralized

Disadvantages:

No official iOS or Android app

Complicated to setup

Ideal For:

People looking to create their own social media server with their own rules

5. Ghost

Ghost is an open-source, simple and minimalistic blogging platform that runs on node.js environment. Being a platform that relies on node.js makes it very fast and responsive. Similar to WordPress, Ghost also comes in two variants, a self-hosted type that can be loaded on to your own server and a hosted type that is already loaded on the Ghost server. Unlike WordPress, none of them are free but the platform includes a 14-day trial to test out the features and accessibility.

Ghost also provides support for thirty party plugins, themes, analytics and FTP file transfer that makes the platform more customizable. Ghost might the best Tumblr alternative for those who are looking for a blogging platform that is easy to setup and use. Don’t forget to try the free trial before investing in the platform.

6. Typepad

Typepad is a simple and popular blogging platform that is used by popular celebrities and companies such as Paris Hilton and BBC. Typepad provides a user-friendly dashboard that includes analytics, themes, posts, comments, etc.

It is one of the best Tumblr alternatives if you would like to use a blogging platform that is very simple but provides more powerful features and options such as banning certain IP addresses or keywords.

Typepad offers a lot of themes and widgets to choose from and all the themes are fully customizable with built-in options or custom CSS or HTML. The widgets include support for monetizing the blog with popular ad networks such as Google Adsense and Amazon.

Bloggers who like to make a live podcast will be most welcomed since the platform supports broadcasting video or audio from their blogs without getting strained.

It also includes builtin SEO tools for easier optimization for Google rankings and also Typepad promotes your blog on their network resulting in generating more traffic. Another important feature is that the platform includes support for linking custom domains.

The Typepad offers four different plans starting from $8.98 with a 14-day trial. However, the billing information required to start the trail.

7. Wix

Another Tumblr alternative that is easy to setup and use. Wix offers a lot of features inside a single package that comes in a free and premium version. Wix is highly customizable with themes and plugins (It is so-called Apps on Wix) but there are not a variety of choices to choose from. The UI is sleek, simple and useful with all the tools to build the site.

While using WordPress, the biggest drawback we face is the security of the platform since it supports a lot of plugins from different developers but that’s not the case in Wix. Wix takes care of all the security solution for you and if you run into any problem, you may contact them directly via mail and phone call

The biggest downside of the platform is the annoying ads that come with the free version. The SEO of Wix sites is also very poor and the sites don’t rank much on Google. Just like other platforms, Wix supports analytics and tracking, however, it requires a premium plan.

8. Soup.io

The soup offers the simplest blogging experience that’s almost identical to Tumblr. In the Soup, you can post pictures, videos, quotes, and text and it lets you import posts from other social media with just a few clicks.

Soup acts like Facebook that the platform consists of many groups that a user can join and interact with other users based on their interests. Adding a custom domain is a great feature of the platform that is worth mentioning.

The UI and features are almost the same as Tumblr, thus switching to the Soup won’t make you feel new to the platform. This makes it the best Tumblr alternative to consider. Customization is good with custom CSS but not comparable to its competitors. There is no support for plugins and much like Wix, the Soup includes ads that are a bit annoying.

Advantages:

Supports custom domain names

Identical user interface and features of Tumblr

Disadvantages:

Annoying ads

No plugin support

Idea for:

People looking for a blogging platform that is not focused on monetization.

9. Reddit

Reddit is not exactly a blogging service but acts more like Social media. Reddit is a larger community with more than 300 million monthly active users with many subreddits. It supports posting linking, pictures, videos, and GIFS with an option to upvote or downvote a post or comment.

Works similar to Facebook likes but Reddit, however, calls it karma and it’s calculated based on your overall upvotes and downvotes. Reddit might not be a complete Tumblr alternative but can be used to promote other blogs and articles.

Remember that there are a lot of subreddits to discuss and post different topics but each of them has its own set of rules. Follow those rules or you will get banned at no cost.

10. Ello

Ello, the creator’s network, that’s what they call it as. Ello is a community for creators who can follow other designers and artists to discuss ideas in various fields. It works much like Twitter but built especially for designers. Those who are looking for a Tumblr alternative that connects an artist with a larger community of artists should consider Ello and try it.

The user interface is minimalistic (but confusing for some people) and offers basic options such as viewing profile, discover new topics, and posting content. It supports images, videos, text, and links for posting.

Final Thoughts

These are the best Tumblr alternatives to try out if you get bored out of Tumblr or just don’t like the platform itself. Each has its own merits and demerits but acts as a good replacement for Tumblr. I personally hate the lack of customizing options on it but these websites do provide them with full to medium options depending on the network.

If you know something that works as the best Tumblr alternative that the list is missing, do comment down and let others know it.